Narayana Stotram

Victory to Narayana, who is Govinda, the cowherd protector, and victory to Narayana, who is Gopala, the keeper of cows. This is the line that carries the whole hymn, sung before the first verse and after each one that follows.

He is the far shore of compassion itself, deep and unfathomable like the sea. The verse opens the hymn the way a devotee's heart usually opens too, with mercy, before it ever gets to power or glory.

Dark and full like a monsoon rain cloud, he is the one who quietly wipes away the accumulated wrongs of this difficult age. There is something comforting in being told that even the mess of a hard era can still be cleared.

He wanders and plays along the banks of the river Yamuna, the radiant Kaustubha gem resting on his chest. This is Krishna in his most familiar, most human-looking form, at home by the riverside.

Dressed in his signature yellow silk, he is the very treasury from which the gods themselves draw their wellbeing. Even the celestials, in other words, depend on him.

He wears sweet gunja-berry ornaments and has taken on the appearance of an ordinary human being, purely through his own power of maya, or divine illusion. The verse is a quiet reminder that the person you might meet is never quite only what they look like.

He tastes the honeyed sweetness that devotion itself offers him, and he shines as the crowning ornament of the moon's own lineage. Sweetness and lineage sit side by side in a single line here.

His flute song is pure delight, and yet the same feet that walk casually through a cow pasture are the ones the Vedas bow down to praise. The verse holds both the playful and the sacred in one breath.

A crown of peacock feathers sits on his head as he dances, quite literally, on the raised hood of the serpent Kaliya. It is the image most children learn first when they hear Krishna's stories.

Lotus flowers become his jewelry, and he is the cherished husband of lotus-eyed Rukmini. Nature and marriage both belong to him without any strain between them.

His eyes are as soft as lotus petals, and yet he is also the very thread from which the whole universe first began to unfold. Tenderness and cosmic scale, again, sitting together.

He burns away the night of one's own wrongdoing, and since mercy is simply what he is made of, the verse turns personal here: lift me up, it asks, plainly and without decoration.

He put an end to the demons Agha and Baka and stood firmly against the tyrant king Kamsa, called here by three names at once: Keshava, Krishna, and Murari.

His robe glows like pure gold, and the line becomes a direct request: grant me fearlessness, and please, do not make me wait for it.

Now the hymn turns to Rama: he is the prince of King Dasharatha, and the one who broke the arrogance of demon armies that thought themselves unstoppable.

He lifted the whole of Govardhan hill as easily as an umbrella, and with the same ease, he captured the hearts of the gopis who loved him.

He walks the banks of the river Sarayu near Ayodhya, and for good people and sages alike he is the wish-granting tree under whose shade they find shelter.

He guarded sage Vishvamitra's fire sacrifice from demons as a young prince, and the verse notes that he carries many other stories inside him too, including his form as Parashurama, the axe-bearing sage.

The soles of his feet carry the marks of a banner, a thunderbolt, and a goad, and his joy is complete only alongside Sita, daughter of the earth.

He is the protector of Sita, King Janaka's daughter, and the verse calls out victory twice over, insisting that every one of his playful deeds deserves to be remembered and retold.

He carried the full weight of his father's promise without a single word of complaint, and walked willingly into fourteen years of exile through the Dandaka forest.

Back to Krishna now, the young wrestler who defeated the trained fighters Mushtika and Chanura in the arena, and who, at the very same time, quietly lives in the meditating minds of sages.

His courage brought down the powerful Vali, and that same strength was used, without hesitation, to lift up his friend Sugriva instead.

Flute still in hand, he is imagined here almost like a patient boatman who ferries people across the river of ordinary life, and the plea comes twice in a row: protect me, protect me, Shridhara, the one who holds Lakshmi close.

With complete calm, he had a bridge built across the ocean itself, and by his own hand, Ravana's stronghold on Lanka was finally broken.

He broke the frenzy of the maddened elephant sent to crush him as a boy, and the verse says plainly that he is rich, overflowing really, in every fine quality a dancer and a devotee could ask for.

With a single glance he restored Ahalya, sage Gautama's wife, from a stone-cold curse, and that same glance is described as a rain cloud of compassion, ready to fall on anyone who looks up for it.

After the panic and grief of Sita's abduction, he still came home in the end to make his life in Saketapuri, the city of Ayodhya. Even the hardest chapters, the verse suggests, lead somewhere.

The same hand remembered for lifting an entire mountain without strain is, this verse says, forever busy doing one thing above all: showing grace to whoever turns to him in devotion.

The hymns of the Vedas exist purely for his delight, and he is the one who stood beside Prahlada, the demon king's own son who chose devotion over his father's cruelty and was protected for it.

In this final verse, Shankara, foremost among the Bharati order of renunciate teachers, declares that the nectar of this one name, Narayana, already lives inside every single being. It is the closest thing this hymn has to a signature.